Author: Ma He, Foresight News
On May 25, the price of NEAR, the native token of the NEAR protocol, stands at $2.37. Since early May, NEAR has surged from a low of $1.24 to a high of $2.5, with its market capitalization returning above $3 billion. While mainstream crypto assets like Bitcoin have been fluctuating, NEAR has charted its own independent upward trajectory, emerging as one of the brightest performing tokens alongside others like ZEC, ONDO, and HYPE. What are the underlying reasons for this breakout?
The AI Narrative
NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin is a seasoned professional in the AI field. Illia is one of the eight co-authors of the seminal Transformer paper, alongside others like Ashish Vaswani and Noam Shazeer from Google Brain / Google Research. This paper introduced the Transformer architecture, which relies entirely on attention mechanisms, significantly improving parallel training efficiency and model scale. It is the foundational framework for all major contemporary large models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.
NEAR has made AI a core strategy from its early days. In February of this year, NEAR officially launched the Near.com super-app, integrating cross-chain swaps, privacy tools, and smart contract management into one platform with built-in AI capabilities, supporting autonomous agent application scenarios. In November 2023, Illia also formally assumed the role of NEAR Foundation CEO, focusing the strategy primarily around the AI narrative.
In May, Nvidia's earnings report spurred a broader recovery in the AI sector, with NEAR being viewed as a representative of decentralized AI infrastructure, alongside tokens like TAO.
On May 22, BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes, in an article, grouped NEAR with HYPE and ZEC in a call for attention, directly igniting market sentiment.
Privacy-Focused Blockchain
Blockchain has long faced the privacy dilemma where 'transparency equals publicity.' The sharp rise of privacy coins like ZEC and XMR has refocused the industry's attention on the privacy sector, leading various protocols, including public blockchains, to start incorporating privacy features.
NEAR was founded in 2018. Its initial core positioning was not AI, but scalability. Its earliest progress primarily revolved around continuously optimizing sharding technology, making it one of the hot 'Ethereum killer' public blockchains at the time.
Because of this, NEAR's public sale on CoinList once crashed the latter's website. During the 2020-2021 bull cycle, NEAR soared from $0.5 to a peak of $20.59, becoming one of the most watched star tokens that year.
However, fast-forwarding to this cycle, the vast majority of older tokens and new VC-backed tokens have been shunned by the market. Therefore, even in this bull cycle, NEAR only reached a high of around $9 in 2024 before declining steadily, hitting a low of $0.84 in 2026.
With the official launch of NEAR Intents, privacy requirements have become critically important. Intents are core to cross-chain transactions, allowing users to execute actions simply by expressing intent. However, large on-chain transactions are vulnerable to MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) attacks when public, a significant drawback for institutions, large holders, and ordinary DeFi users alike.
The NEAR team began planning privacy as a crucial complement to Intents. In late May this year, the NEAR Intents team launched Confidential Payments and Confidential Intents features, supporting private cross-chain transfers for assets like ETH, BTC, SOL, and USDC across 35+ chains. The sender, amount, and path are all hidden, with only the result visible on the target chain, utilizing a private shard + TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) bridge at the underlying layer.
NEAR also opened a privacy mode, where user balances, transfers, and transaction activities are private by default. Whether for ordinary users, enterprise users, or AI agents executing complex strategies, this prevents data leakage. The Confidential Treasuries (Trezu) launched around the same time further supports private multi-signature wallets, payroll, and cross-chain payments, having already processed $68 million in confidential transactions.
Compared to pure privacy coins like Zcash, NEAR's balance between privacy, usability, and cross-chain functionality is more practical, directly addressing enterprise-level demand and driving a recovery in TVL and developer activity.
NEAR Intents Fee Buyback
In October 2025, NEAR completed the unlocking of its final batch of initial supply, bringing its circulating supply close to 100%.
NEAR designed a dual mechanism of inflation + burning from its mainnet's early days: a maximum annual inflation of 5% (permanently halved to 2.5% via an upgrade in October 2025), with 90% going to validators as rewards and 10% entering the protocol treasury. Entering 2026, the project has no major unlock events or linear unlocks remaining, only the regular epoch reward emissions (approximately 5.4 million NEAR released in the last 30 days, about 0.4% of total supply).
In addition, the fee revenue generated by NEAR Intents is used to directly buy back NEAR tokens on the market, also creating significant buying pressure.
NEAR's intent-driven cross-chain transaction layer on the protocol allows users to simply express their desired outcome (e.g., swapping BTC for SOL), and it provides the optimal execution path, supporting multiple chains without the need for bridging/wrapped assets and featuring low fees.
NEAR Intents previously had two fee components: protocol fees and distribution fees (shared with third-party integrators). However, protocol fees now entirely go into the buyback path. The repurchased NEAR isn't necessarily burned immediately; instead, after being bought back, it is staked, locked, or removed from liquidity. It still counts towards the total supply but reduces circulating supply pressure while also earning staking rewards.
According to the latest data from defiLlama, the TVL of NEAR Intents has exceeded $80 million, with its daily generated fees fluctuating around $100,000, translating to a monthly buyback amount of approximately $3 million.
At the end of this month, its core development team, Near One, also announced the latest technical progress. The team plans to release dynamic resharding by the end of Q2 2026 to significantly enhance scalability. Additionally, the team will introduce NEAR's post-quantum secure signature scheme and perform upgrades in June this year, improving its resistance to quantum computing.
